Danese Cooper

Open Source Cope Evangelist - PayPal Distinguished Member

Danese has a long history of successfully combining work in social justice and digital inclusion with leading open source advocacy at some of the largest global technology companies.

She joined PayPal as a Distinguished Member, Technical Staff – Open Source as of February 2014. She also runs DaneseWorks, an open source consultancy whose clients have included the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Numenta, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortia, AutoDesk and if(we) Inc.

Prior to founding DaneseWorks she was CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation (home of Wikipedia). Since 1999, she has been involved in developing and evangelizing the Open Source movement and its attached methodologies, including release of some very key open source projects while at Sun Microsystems, such as Apache Tomcat, OpenOffice.org, JXTA.org, NetBeans.org, GridEngine.org, GlassFish, OpenSolaris. At Intel she worked on projects designed to bridge the Digital Divide and fed a growing interest/participation in the Social Software movement. Prior to the dawn of Open Source she enjoyed a long career at proprietary companies including Apple, Microsoft and Symantec. She is also co-editor of the book, Open Sources v2.0 and a reviewing editor of the Art of Community, both from O’Reilly Media.